Cream reduces the pain for breast-cancer patients

October 6, 2009

By Flinn Foundation

[Source: The Arizona Republic] – Jesse Crowe remembers the woman lying on his imaging table three years ago. She was in her 40s, young for a breast-cancer patient, and she was tense with fear and apprehension.

“She was the type you don’t see,” Crowe said. “I remember doing the injection and how painful it was for her.

“She was crying. … She described it as worse than childbirth.”

As a nuclear-medicine supervisor at Banner Baywood Medical Center in Mesa, part of Crowe’s job is to inject a radioactive tracer dye as part of a procedure called a “sentinel-node biopsy.”